Solana is Launching a Phone? | Co-Founders Anatoly & Raj

Transcript

hey bankless nation welcome to another episode of state of the nation where we do a deep dive on a specific topic relevant in crypto hey guys are you ready for the web 3 phone wars because i think that is just kicking off david that is our subject today last um roll up we had a take on the solana phone i feel like david we didn't exactly nail that take all right we didn't get a complete take there and we want to rectify that today we want to do a deep dive with a more nuanced take on what solana is launching so we have anatoly and raj the co-founders of solana to tell us more about the solana phone david what are we going to cover today yeah so there's a

interestingly in the last two weeks three phone announcements all happened uh salon is definitely the biggest the biggest phone announcement with like the most amount of just like effort and energy put behind it so of course we got to bring the solana team on to to talk about it but overall like the thing that we were missing when we talked about it on the weekly roll up ryan is like obviously we use crypto on our computers uh you know your phone is also a computer but what does a phone first ecosystem really unlock the web3 crypto world what does that really bring and that is a question that i don't think we knew what the answer was on the weekly rollup and that's the question i think we are trying to answer here what does a mobile first uh mobile specific web3 ecosystem really bring to the table not

just for solana but for the entire crypto industry and why is everyone seemingly having their mobile play uh at this present moment uh so i have things to unpack here and i still have some questions david and i still have a little bit of skepticism but i i'm hopeful by the end of this episode we might be able to update our take on what the saloon solana phone actually is how where it adds value to the ecosystem and what it is about so that is the subject today also david gotta tell them about our friends and sponsors over at juno so david juno has this fantastic uh crypto native bank is what i would call it what's special about a juno account uh so it has all of the powers of crypto built right into it so you get your your

normal features that you'd expect like yield on your uscc or your bitcoin or your ether but i'm pretty sure this is the only checking account in the world that goes straight from your checking account straight into crypto but not just got to be the only one right on layer twos you go from your bank account to optimism arbitrary polygon and they also have zk sync and starkware coming soon as well it's the only bank account in the world that does that uh you get your direct deposit into this account and then you get zero fees to swap that direct deposit fiat into the crypto assets that you know and love and you can also automate that too so like checking count to layer twos that's crazy yield on your crypto assets we like that uh but then also getting your direct deposit in crypto uh juno it's

like it's the crypto first bank account for the digital age they got a deal going on too right so look at the top says welcome bankless listeners uh there's a little deal tell us about that david uh yeah so if you uh deposit money from your direct deposit you get 100 from juno uh and if you deposit crypto on the crypto side of things you get ten dollars they are paying you to be a customer yeah as long as you gotta have a bank account you have real-life fiat bills you need one of these it is a step to go bank list uh and it's an upgrade from your wells fargo account i can tell you that much david got to ask you the question we start every single state of the nation with which is what is the state of the nation today sir you know

that batman movie with bane where there's that meme where he goes we're going mobile that is the state of the nation oh my god that's a deep cut right there i barely remember that clip okay yeah well anyways everyone's going mobile uh solana is looking like it's leading the charge into the mobile first ecosystem so we're going to explore what does it mean to go mobile as a crypto industry uh because it's not just putting your crypto apps on your phone it's much more than that uh and i think anatolian and raj have some of the answers there as to what web3 mobile really really looks like look this is a big project to sink your teeth into during the build market which is what we're in so we'll get the full scope scoop in just a minute we'll

be right back with anatolian raj from solana but before we do we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible rocket pool is your decentralized ethereum staking protocol you can stake your eath in rocket pool and get r eth in return allowing you to stake your eath and use it in defy at the same time you can get four percent on your eath by staking it with rocket pool but you can get even more by running a node rocket pool is the only staking provider that allows anyone to permissionlessly join their network of validating ethereum nodes setting up your rocketpool node is easier than running a node solo and you only need 16e to get started you getting an extra 15 staking commission on the pooled eid that uses your note to stake you'll also get rpl token rewards on top so if

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instead you can spin up a maker vault and use your collateral to mince die directly with maker the power to mince new money is in your hands and there's something new in the maker dow ecosystem every time a new maker dao is opened the owner can claim a po out which contributes funds to one tree planted an organization with ongoing global reforestation efforts creating a world where digital participation and the health of our environment can live side by side soon maker will be present on all chains and layer twos bringing the biggest and best d5 credit facility to everywhere there is defy so follow maker on twitter at maker dow and learn from the oldest and most resilient dow in existence hey guys welcome back we are here with the co-founders of salon we've got anatoly who's the co-founder of solana

and also the co-founder of solana lab so the protocol and the labs company we also have raj who's the co-founder of solana the ceo of solana labs and a board member of the solana foundation we're going to talk a little bit about all of those organizations so you get some context but the main topic of discussion is the solana mobile phone raj anatoly how you guys doing great yeah great how are you guys we're we're doing okay you know this is um a time for reflection it's a time where we get to concentrate there's not as much noise in the space um but let's start there before we get into the phone conversation how are you guys doing in the bear market what has changed what has stayed

the same like what are the vibes like over in the solana ecosystem and uh you know what you guys are building right now uh anatoly won't you start well i think the the bull market was the exception for us we started in the 2018 bear market um so we were kind of used to the the slog of it like this feels normal to me actually like we gotta work we gotta like you know hustle and uh you know make connections talk to a lot of people build so it kind of feels more natural so i feel like you know you guys calling it the build market that's a good good analogy good way to put it right raj you feel the same how are you feeling yeah totally i mean i think um

i i if i got better at um monitoring the velocity of uh email and telegram i might be able to find and calculate some kind of like leading indicator of you know a market collapse um but it's just amazing i mean i think the the noise really cuts cuts down by a factor of 10 and it becomes so much more clear you know what the um what the important and durable problems are to solve uh that are gonna push the space forward for another 10 years so um yeah i think during during the uh the big run-up um it felt like it grew to sort of a fever pitch and and you know you see these wild dreams about what what might be

possible and what people want to build and um i think when when uh when clearer mines prevail um and then the markets cool down it just becomes a lot clearer what's actually worth building right yeah i'd absolutely resonate with that and this was uh i don't know how many cycles you guys have been into maybe uh answer that question next but this was my second go-around and at the peak of this bull market like i knew things were crazy i knew things were weird but like there were sometimes they were like damn it i fell for it again like it's the same i've seen this guy how many uh how many cycles have you guys gone through this this would have been the second bull run that i was like hyper aware of

what was happening yeah same yeah so during this uh during this bear market now that we have our sober caps on uh just explain explain to me like what's just the vision for like what solana wants to get done in the bear market obviously this uh this mobile thing which is gonna be the the focus of this conversation but just like generally in the whole solana ecosystem what do you guys focus on during the bear it's still the same thing so i think product like how to get crypto adoption how to get crypto to a billion people those are like the big dreams and it's really really hard for us to know which apps or what use cases are going to drive it so the only way we can do that is to like get devs to build them like get a thousand people throwing

darts against the board and one of them's gonna hit a bullseye so we're really focused on developer tooling developer adoption like everything and that ultimately boils down to even like low level network performance because the faster the network is the cheaper it is the more devs use cases they can launch and build and you know hopefully get the next bull market started you think back to like defy summer that was four companies really right that was it so out of the thousand devs so it took a thousand shots on gold four of them did it right and that kicked everything off so we need the next four or five whatever entrepreneurs to figure that out

uh does anything change when token price is like down big right so like uh eath price is down 80 percent you know bitcoins way down solana's down like 87 high is are there things you can't do when token price is down or does like is price kind of just back background noise it doesn't really matter it doesn't affect your roadmap plans we never grew to a large company so labs is 75 people so like we were not it's not like we got to cut personnel and stuff like that that's been like i think like we only hired people when like there was a fire that or like i was so overloaded

or like that we could hand off a task that i'm like okay you go do this and then i go do the next thing and that has kept us i think at a size that it price isn't as important as to i think maybe other companies yeah i think i think either you know um you you over levered and you're an investor you're a hedge fund um you know or you were providing an unsustainable product that really needed growth needed needed a market run up to to keep um going and you blow up or you know the lighter version is you you just scaled up a little bit too much you have to do layoffs but both of those are pretty painful and and luckily we haven't had to do either one one comment while you were talking

anatoly about kind of d5 summer it was just four companies one thing i've been thinking of is actually how resilient defy has been over the past couple of months particularly when you contrast it to cfi and how actually if you think about this from a fundamentals perspective like this is what's just happened in crypto how all of the c file that all the trusted proxies kind of broke down yet defy survived is more fundamentally bullish for d5 than d5 summer 2020. in my mind that is true and so if you're a fundamentals investor if you're a builder and you just watched all of the claps of cfi around you and d5 is still standing fundamentally

that is incredibly bullish even though price doesn't reflect it right uh so just an observation i have yeah i don't know 100 agree with you when maker uh like survived a 2020 crash when everything dropped in one day by like 50 percent and maker survived it i was like okay this is despite people like on it and then like complaining about like the it was like a it was a stressful time for them but the fact that it basically survived i was like okay this is a thing that can handle a double black swan that was built like on this like kind of toy like everyone like it was like a toy computer right like prior to that but

all of a sudden it's one that can handle like this crazy financial collapse and i thought that really to me showed the resilience of d5 and that was before i think d5 really broke to them out into the mainstream okay so i want to turn this conversation to to the phone conversation and so i want to read a quote that uh thankfully somebody put from our own uh weekly roll up into the youtube chat here so i said we said on the on the roll-up bankless says that a blockchain having its own phone feels like a big distraction and quote feels weird uh questioning why solana entered the hardware game when blockchains are software so i'll open up the question to you guys like why does web3 or or even a specific blockchain

ecosystem need a phone like what what does that do for that ecosystem so labs is a company it's not the protocol right the protocol is a bunch of math a bunch of codes run by a bunch of validators and labs the company builds products one of those products is a phone and it's a web3 phone it is primarily like we're focused on the solana part but the stack the the sms stack it's open source so if there's devs i want to add ethereum support bitcoin support just npr's we'll integrate and we'll get them audited and we'll make it happen and the goal for this product right is to build an awesome experience a delightful experience for signing for self-custody

for those integrations between applications like native applications and digital items nfts and all the stuff you want to do with web3 just make it really really like as amazing as using apple pay right like every time i use apple pay i'm like this is i don't want to enter another credit card ever again right like this doesn't suck i want the same experience for crypto we don't have that lex and you kind of need a couple pieces for that to work the main piece is taking the seed phrase and sticking it inside the secure element on the on the phone it's not a new piece of hardware i was at qualcomm like seven years ago there were secure elements on every

device that ever shipped there's a trust zone on every device that ever shipped just adding those apis so you can do bip 39 key recovery it's pretty pretty simple right like having the trust zone be able to sign and give the user a trusted display so the wallet can't lie to you what you're signing the wallet never sees your seed phrase that means that phantom can is now can ship an application the user doesn't have to trust phantom to not screw up their seat phase and that thing can be brought up and tap to pay when you go pay for your coffee or when like magic eden wants you to you know pay for an nft or something like that so that like piece of hardware allows devs to innovate and that innovation is what i hope will

bring product market fit get to those billion users you need devs to throw darts at the ball you know at the target right now they've all been doing this on desktop mobile is such a such a prevalent thing especially outside of the us in europe like most people just have a phone as their primary computer actually most of them an android phone okay so uh you you said that all of the devices that shipped out to qualcomm and i'm assuming every single mobile device out there has that like secure element like 99 at least the hardware is there the software is not right okay so i think that that leads us into like there are two there's two parts of this conversation there's the hardware of the

solana phone the the saga phone and then there's the the software the sms stack would you say like one of these things is more important than the other and if you're telling me that like every bit of hardware has more or less the same like parts the same components i'm guessing it's the sms the solana mobile uh stack part that's kind of over the long term over the long term long term over the long term i hope that what we're doing just gets co-opted by google and apple and they're like yeah this should exist and they just ship it and then all of a sudden we crack them open and web 3 mobile native is there and everyone's happy i think like what you imagine like you know post crypto adoption you imagine your phone doing native

signing right native applications like all that stuff being integrated being shipped by every major manufacturer that's gonna happen but somebody has to do it first and the device this flagship device it's built by an amazing team like jason if it wasn't for jason this would have never happened he's the founder of awesome he was the lead architect of ipad pro he built like james cameron submarine door did like crazy projects for johnny eve that he can't talk about and like was the first or second hire at essential and like this is the device and his ability to ship hardware is what like allowed this idea to actually go from you know

me dreaming about the day that we're gonna have like native crypto experiences on mobile and they're like okay let's go do this um so so one important thing there is the you know if you once you guys hold the device you'll see it's it stands alone as a flagship quality android phone and it's it's kind of under cutting the market on on price um so you know worst case this is just a really really awesome android phone uh for for android users but um yeah as you can see from the site and if you watch the announcement um i think the video is there on on solana mobile.com too maybe we don't need to watch it now because it's like an hour and a half long but you know the first announcement was

celina mobile stack and and um you know uh maybe maybe it's worth mentioning for for folks who don't know but salon mobile stack is a few different features it's it's seed fault that uses the secure element for uh you know for a custody protocol it allows instant signing of transactions um but it partitions the private keys from wallets and apps and and the rest of the android operating system so it's something like you know cold cold storage on your phone um and then there's the the mobile wallet adapter um which you know lets you sign transactions basically across all mobile web so you're not dealing with these these web views in applications and you know copying and pasting links between apps uh to you know access mints and things like that and then there's the the dab store um

salon adapt store that uh is basically no fees um no restrictions on nfts or or tokens um and uh you know and it's just a free playground for uh all the apps that people have already been using on solana to just launch in a mobile native way and that needs to happen because like the digital like like items like nfts are owned by the users right they're not owned by the content creator and this is something that just doesn't work with web to mobile apps like google and apple expect the application that is the mobile app to be the creator that owns that content to be able to take twenty percent of the value of that content and send it to google but like magic eden

can't add two thousand dollars in a ten thousand dollar nft sale on a mobile app because that would like kill them right like it just doesn't work like when you when you get to true digital content like the way that the business models for like the big app stores just don't work and they'll change eventually but the only way they'll change is that somebody pokes that bear you know a little bit um so that's our hope is that like we're the ones that poke him hard enough and they're like okay fine we better we better change your models and that frees up mobile for everyone yeah i think a couple things that happen here too like um you know our the first 250 000 users for solana came through

dgen ape academy the you know just these 3d apes and it was a total shock like we didn't we didn't know that was where usage was going to come from anyway and that that was a result of you know metaplex launching and basically breaking like the nifty gateway model um of these constrained uh launches and and no unchain uh you know royalty splits and it iterated really rapidly through like a hundred thousand projects into this you know really strong product market fit for pfps and then step in you know we didn't know step in what's gonna happen right and get to two million users that quickly and and i think if you speak to you know tap developers today they have no idea how to get something like that through the app stores it's just it's so

um opaque of a of an approval process and and even if they get through it so long and then if something gets approved they're really afraid to iterate on it and change it you know because it might it might then get banned and in my mind you know as soon as stepping happened there should be 10 step ins um you know and we should be rapidly saturating you know everyone who has a key pair um on you know solani ethereum everywhere with these applications to get product market fit and learn to grow in that way so we can then figure out how to make them you know really sustainable and deliver more value to those those models so when we talked to you know app developers um there's you know there was just this very clear big mental block like we're

not even really thinking about a world where we can do anything in the app store and every user has uh you know the ability to sign transactions across the whole operating system that's just not like the way we've been operating and with users it's just very clear you know pain points and that you know today i think crypto's in a very different place than you know three years ago because now we can say look like solana's got 20 at times 22 million monthly active addresses you know 6 million weeklies and we there's millions of people trying to get these nfts and we hear all the time like we see people um you know carrying their laptops through conferences or you know leaving a party or skipping a party because

there's some hot mint happening or you know um an nft starts mooning and they're like i gotta go de-list it like i literally have to go home you know like people are leaving you know this has become important enough for at least a few hundred thousand people um you know maybe a few million that um they're leaving their everyday life i'm sure you guys you know feel this and experience this like you you can't really live your normal life anymore because we have to access our crypto assets like we found something that is a foundational use case um an asset class and you know we're basically tethered to these these uh dells so the just i've gotten is that the the mobile stack the software side of

this uh whole endeavor is the bigger the bigger of the two stories but the software stack can't fully express itself on the legacy hardware that currently exists in the world today you can't take this salon on a mobile stack and put it on like uh apple apple phone or or any other criteria you need an oem's permission to do that because you need an oem to modify the trusted element you can't like us as developers can't get that code through the app store so we need to work with oems and that means working with somebody like saga and having a flagship device and having like a founder that gets it that has like gets web 3 gets gets the privacy elements of it and wants to build

a thing that represents that like the physical example of that i think is what can set the example for like everyone else in the world like eventually i'd love to have htc samsung whoever like take these take sms and integrate it's just a bunch of open source code right so lana is not playing in the game of like uh apple or who are the other like htc you guys aren't you guys aren't trying to be a salon labs or like insanely profitable by selling these bits of hardware you're using the hardware as like a trojan horse to get the solana mobile stack integrated into the greater mobile ecosystem that is beyond your guys's control is that is that right i hope we sell a shitload of phones and

i hope saga and awesome are extremely profitable i mean that would be great but um that's so the the thing is that like the thesis here is that 50 000 web3 early adopters that have this device that are active users that without web3 without any restrictions in the app store for them is a better distribution channel for devs than the big app stores are today with millions of users that that's the big thesis is that if we can get the right 50 000 people to have these devices devs are going to build apps and that's going to grow and start growing maybe 200 200 000 at some point google and apple will

figure it out and be like okay we need to have a real web 3 model and business model that works with web3 we need all these features we want signing to be secure for users and they'll shift right but like i don't have this belief that you were going to take down google and apple that's ludicrous right a little bit but crypto believes that they're going to take down you know the 20 trillion dollar financial system um we're not going to take it down we're just going to make a better one we want them to change right you want the world to change ultimately not it's not necessarily like it's a pretty ground up rebuild right right you call it web 3 for for a reason it's it's supposed to be fairly

foundational and i think you guys i'm sure are as frustrated as we are about this but like all these cycles we've been through and you hear you know these partnership announcements and you know xyz big company says all right we're doing it we're doing the crypto thing we're jumping into web3 and a whole cycle goes by as soon as the market cools down they get cold feet they lay off whoever they hired to work on it you got new people come in for the next cycle try and pick it up and it just never goes anywhere there's no durability you know because unless they see um organic you know grassroots applications that create a credible threat to their core business model they don't really move that fast um and yeah i mean we've seen this like goldman

sachs called everything rat poison until the very last possible woman until there's billions of dollars leaving all of their you know most profitable uh accounts to go into this this new defy thing then they say okay we're hiring a 30 person team and who knows now with the market downturn like are they still persisting are they going to be innovating and pushing things forward in our experience it just doesn't happen so you know you have to have products that are fully owned and controlled by the crypto industry and and that you know durably relentlessly push against these these problems for users okay so these are things i think that um uh the solana community and you guys have clarified for for david and myself because i think the first blush when you

see this the question is like oh is solana trying to get into the hardware game and do they have the audacity to compete against apple and samsung and what started to make more sense to me as i learned more about this is like that's not the purpose right david's uh nutri other nutritional podcast that he's gonna start someday he he always says to me that like you weren't supposed to tell me it's not true okay that's that's that's still uh that's still top secret we always says to me carbs are just a delivery mechanism for for delivering real food to the body okay so this hardware phone is just a delivery mechanism for sms which is the solana mobile stack and distributing that and hopefully you get

some hardcore fans who want a full stack type phone and buy the hardware but the goal is to kind of saturate the software stack out there and so that starts to make more sense to me you guys are not trying to compete against apple or google but can you build out and so one other thing um i think people mistook david and i's take on the roll up we're actually like bullish on the potential of a web 3 phone because i think we see what you see which is like we can't be beholden for to apple and you know the google store to whitelist metamask what happens if they just de-list our metamask and phantom wallets

like what do we do then and so we need to have a way to route around them and and and also what happens if they disallow all of our like if they call everything that we're doing with all of our crypto economics in-app purchases and they want to cut out of that and it breaks our terms of service sorry guys so we absolutely need a way to route around that but but i want to ask you it's like are some of the features that come in the hardware side of things they're already available on our like apple phones and our samsung phones like so the seed vault piece right help me understand that like we all have these uh yeah there's um yeah so you have like

your your your board or whatever it depends how the integration work there's a separate piece of hardware from your main cpu that is a secure element and that thing has various features and does various services but it can hold your secrets and you have a trust zone component on the chip it's slightly different on an apple device but i'm more familiar with the qualcomm ones that thing runs on a chip it runs in a special context that the high level os android and all the applications they can never read the memory there so that trust zone can decode the seed phrase generate read you know get your key generated and then sign transactions and it can also take over part of the

display or any part of the display and they can show you like a trusted set of things that you're signing like the numbers like hey you're signing this transaction and you're actually signing a hundred dollar transfer and the user can then confirm that like okay the wallet didn't lie to me i'm actually signing a hundred dollar transfer so all that all that hardware pieces and all that stuff exists in every phone it exists in every qualcomm chip the there's apple versions of this and they use these systems for various applications already like to decode your thumb print or whatever or your face id but they don't use them for crypto they don't use them for signing and i think

part of the reason is that like there is no like crypto adoption actual number of users that sign transactions on a monthly basis all in aggregate all together and all the chains is still pretty small like i don't know what what do you guys estimate like if you combined all the chains solana even binance marching together how many humans actually sign stuff 10 million i i think i think it's probably five to ten million right and that's not enough for like google and apple to be like okay we gotta like we gotta make changes to the os and make changes to the webster policies when their user numbers are in like billions

right like so so there's so much more we could get out of these secure enclaves the hardware piece that we can't because we don't google and apple and other uh manufacturers aren't giving us the software that would allow us to tap into these things and that's what solana mobile stack is trying to do okay and then the mobile wallet adapter that's open source as well i believe so what is that and also i'm curious the context is is this only for running solana or could other blockchains also run so it's open source okay it's open source people can send us code we'll integrate it we'll

get it audited and like we'll make sure it lands um so in that sense like it's true open source we're doing all the development out front and we want contributors but obviously we know solana best so everything we're doing is solana first it would be uh ridiculous for for us to try to build an awesome ethereum integration because we're gonna know about ethereum so like i don't even wanna try but like it is truly open source i'm an open source maxi um the wallet adapter like when an application like has a connect button and you see 10 different wallets and then another application has a different set of wallets right that's an application specific

connect button we just want that to go away and for the application to assume the os has figured out what wallet the user prefers and just be connected automatically much easier user experience small piece of code that again like we we don't have like a 30 team working on it right now it's like five engineers right like so these are this doesn't take like a ton of resources to build but these are small pieces that i feel like should be in every phone and we'll be in five years when the world has changed and we're in crypto utopia but right now like we need to build them and just just to clarify what i think this looks like

for the end user is that like say say for example like if i opened up my phone right now i would have like my metamask wallet i would have uh my other wallet wall number three well number four uh and each one of these is its own seed phrase each one of these is its own private key uh but like the uh we could change that game and then so if i go and like i go up to open to my desktop and i go to like unit swap unit swap's like okay do you have a metamask do you have wallet connect do you have like and there's like 30 different wallet options and so with this like integration into the straight into the hardware there's just like show me your phone like i know that's where your private keys are just show me that

one and like we're good to go is that the kind of vision here anatoly basically yep yeah and then okay so the the last piece here so we talked about the seed seed vault the mobile wallet adapter and so the the solana dapp store so is there a business model for this like is there any kind of take rate that this lana app store and the and then what's like the listing policy so the listing policy is a really hard part okay right now it's basically like gonna be like our internal team trying to review it until that can't scale and the hope is that the saga pass and like the ability for us to use the kind of models that we see that work in taos and like being able to like create moderators and things like that

and make that workable that we can scale that to to start doing moderation and creating like basically lists right you should be able to subscribe to your like monkey dao's like favorite app store list and that they're the ones providing the moderation but that is a gnarly problem that's going to take a lot of work uh it's gnarly because it's a governance problem of course right yeah exactly um the model for for fees and stuff on the app store i think can be something simple in the future right now there's no fees but like if you're trying to like build something and there's no credible business model at all ever it's it's probably not going to work

right like in the long term i think the way that this should work is um like basically some small percentage sub 1 like i don't know 20 20 basis point fees in every transaction something that i feel like is totally fine because it's paying for the development of the of the product but it's not crushing the the whole business models for all the applications running on it and to be clear so if somebody had the saga phone or some other android phone with the solana mobile operating system installed on it you'd have the solana dapp store and then you'd also have like the google app store as well so you can download all

your other google apps through that and then the solana app stores for kind of the uh the web3 things yep just so it's fully google mobile service enabled all your google stuff is there awesome has uh some like kind of lockdown modes where you can basically kill services so you can if you want to as a user shut down google or other services and that's a pretty cool feature that's um that the awesome team built it's worth mentioning also that it's it's not just dapps that can launch in the salon adapt store any application that wants to launch in a no fee environment can launch in that app store um so we you know we've already seen a

lot of the games that are leaning into web3 uh looking at this is a pretty attractive mobile play independent of their desire to have digital assets within the game i i do think it's important to understand and from a development standpoint or in an innovation standpoint that like 30 percent take rate that apple charges on the ios app store that's like that's like a that's like a tax that and which is it's a stunt on innovation and and progress and especially in the web 3 world when so much of like the back ends of so many apps is a blockchain like openc openc is not going to have an ios app because they're not going to give apple 30 percent of the volume going through open keys that's

not going to happen right and so like it's like physically impossible for them to do that like totally they would go bankrupt all right like or the users are never going to pay 30 uh markup on any digital purchases it's just not going to work 100 and so not only is like the whole rest of the world been like deprived of a zero fee environment to like fully innovate and express the world of just like mobile apps because apple keeps on taking it all the web 3 world never really had that opportunity but also needs it even more because it's inherently about like money and transactions and trading and swapping and all these things so like we've never actually really seen a blossoming like mobile developer ecosystem so it's kind

of like no wonder why there hasn't been a a blossom developer ecosystem that's gone mobile before uh but hopefully before this it's really really hard to build a phone i worked on like every phone that failed that you've ever heard of like the web os devices the blackberry q and x ones are you type you were talking before iphones yeah yeah metrophone uh the amazon fire do you remember that thing yeah so i i was like one of the engineers trying to get those things to work uh and it's really really tough and i think the the real like opportunity we have is that like maybe the crypto users are actually like the most lucrative users

in the world right now because look at open seas volumes look at magic eden's volumes the number of users that they have is much much smaller than like you know any app in in the ios store that's in the top ten but they're generating a ton of real profit and a ton of real revenue so that that's the opportunity one one more question for you guys then we when we get a cup for sponsors we have a whole lot more to cover including like the the phone wars and some of the competitors that are that are entering and second order effects and how this thing is funded and everything else but what about this criticism this is not a criticism or a critique we raised on the roll-up but some people are saying like hey anatoly raj look building a scalable

blockchain is freaking hard enough okay and like there's a lot of work to do okay solana's had some outages of course everyone knows ethereum is it has not scaled yet still hasn't done its merge like we have a lot of work to do is this a distraction or why not have a separate team do this why are you guys personally involved what would you say to that critique or question so like um for the same reason that you can't like add more engineers and accelerate the merge right there's just you need experts that are deep working on hard problems and a lot of those hard problems are solved by only one engineer that just given time and space to do it

and there's a bunch of there's a really strong core team of system engineers that are constantly iterating on the chain and making it better and cheaper and faster and more reliable um if they need hires they will get hires right like like i said before there's like five engineers at labs that are separate team a new team that we spun up i you know my qualcomm background gives me like a really strong network of of pulling from uh mobile from the mobile world and that team is building this and it's a separate product and our focus on this is uh people think it's a distraction but like part of the reason why this idea came to fruition like in large part is that

i talked to devs and i constantly ask him what are the problems you're dealing with what are the challenges and half of them like half of the conversations ended up mobile like we can't like do what we want like we have to go through these like weird inter like interfaces and jump through webviews with phantom and when that problem gets repeated to me over and over i start you know pacing around the room trying to figure out how i fix it so like this this idea of launching sms and the phone really comes from like just talking to devs and us telling us like this is a problem and we don't know how to how to fix it one last thing i'll say in support of that and then then we get a cut though is like um some people think that scalability just

means transactions per second but i think when you think about when you define scalability as we want to bring a billion people into crypto then you also have to take other things into account you have to think about privacy you have to look at user experience you have to look at the fact that it is still mission impossible to go bankless unless you have a desktop machine you can't go solely bankless on a mobile device right now it's just not possible and so that is also another definition of scalability if you kind of broaden that um so i uh yeah i uh but you guys are gonna like try to like destroy that's the second one

for the second half which david's about to go there opening me up i guess uh in the second half of the show ryan already listed off a few of the topics but also there's this like jason keats guy who i didn't know who he was before uh i started like researching all about this so i want to ask you guys about that uh and then all the things that ryan mentioned about five minutes ago so we're gonna get into all those topics and more right after we get through some of these fantastic sponsors to make the show possible there is a brand new staking feature in the ledger live app today we all like staking the assets that we're bullish on and now you can stake seven different coins inside the ledger live app cosmos polka dot tron algorithms tezos solana and of course ethereum with ledger live you can take

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ethereum optimism polygon arbitra or boba networks all right bank of nation we are back with the co-founders of solana and as i was going through the process of putting this whole uh agenda together i came across this name jason keats who uh everyone seems to speak really really highly of but i had no idea who this individual was uh anatoly you want to walk us through who jason keats is uh how he's working with uh with you guys on this saga phone and what's his deal so before we launch into that real quick uh i can plug totally just did an interview with jason on the solana podcast so everyone should go check that one out but i'll summarize it so he's a he's an astrophysicist they got into hardware because he started building

stuff for his professor for telescopes and he was like i like this more and started like that's where his like kind of career started and uh ended up starting a motorcycle company then like working on solar panels then joining apple and leading the i like lead architect for ipad pro the first one like when they went from like ipad to ipad pro he was like the guy that did it and um was the first or second employee at essential which is andy rubin's company like the the founder of of the android and this project awesome was his baby is like i can build a better phone than anyone else

and i have the best people to do that and so they decided to build this this thing and they got from like nothing to uh evt one like a working device fully built in like six months which is pretty insane and that's the point where i met him and i started talking to him about trying to red pill him into like web 3 and mobile and my vision for it and like you never know these conversations right you meet a thousand people that are not on crypto and you talk to them and like all of a sudden like just everything clicked for him and he was like okay let's let's do this let's like make a a device that's like web 3 first like but an awesome device like a flagship

top of the line android device that can be like had to have be competitive with like the best out of uh samsung or or apple even so the summer awesome anatoly and it's osom that's what okay i was not following that pronunciation i thought you were saying a-w-e-s-o-m like awesome but this is oh some awesome is is it right yep and this is what the saga phone essentially is it's a a creation hardware creation that awesome and jason made yep and it's worth mentioning that um you know i think if if this was five years ago ten years ago it probably would take

you know five or ten times as many people as the awesome team has it's a it's a pretty small team and um and and also they're they're super high powered yeah you know they they're very nimble they they move super fast they bring things to market really quickly and i think when totally meets somebody like that um you know often it uh that speaks a lot and and things move really quickly in a partnership and anatoly you've got the hardware with you right now right uh i know we're gonna try and communicate what the device is like through internet which is gonna be hard but like what's it like can you describe it um okay so it's got a 120 fps screen it's like bright and beautiful like just looks great uh and it's got a metal case so it like

feels really good and high end um i like it more than the glass devices that you see like out of apple and stuff like so beyond that it's like just a really good android phone like i don't know like how else to describe it like when people get this device they're going to be like this is a has the the feel of like what a premium android device should feel like cool very cool and it's only um we want to also talk about some other competitors who have kind of thrown their hat in the ring here and uh you know part of the theme is it it felt like solana launched something and then all of a sudden this uh ethos device and maybe it's not a device a

software um mobile software for ethereum is on the scene and polygon as well announced a partnership with htc is this all like just coincidence that everyone had the same good idea and they're all trying to implement it at once or like what's going on with the timing of all of those i'm gonna say we kicked it off but i don't know like i think uh i think generally there's enough really smart people in crypto know that they're all working on all the good ideas and maybe the first one to go lurches them everyone else forward and we made a big splash an announcement that i think kind of maybe drove some of those decisions to like okay we actually have to move a little faster and like

get out um but i doubt we were the only ones thinking about how we crack mobile open for crypto um but if i'll take the credit for it sure what do you think about these other approaches are they are they similar like um etho us we haven't gone into detail on it but i don't know if you've looked at it i would have to dig into it i think from what i'm seeing in the website i think it's uh probably similar ideas to sms but i don't know how deep they go in terms of the integration and um also like what is the integration on this device are they doing like the secure trusted element work and like all these other ux like

improvements like it's like you know the difference between apple computers and the non-apple computers in the 80s there was like a vision behind them to integrate them in a very specific way and i hope that we have that vision right between myself and jason that like we optimize this device from the fact how fast like the thumbprint decides that you sign the transaction and like all these things you really want to iterate and make it like an experience that people like enjoy right and then when they use something else you're like ah this sucks right like you want that like you want to get used to the good thing and make it really really good so i hope that that's what we can achieve but like me and jason working together i uh just want to

make the point to bankless listeners that uh more competitors entering the space good it's good for you as a user okay because all of these all of these uh software companies are now fighting to make the best possible crypto web 3 mobile user experience and they're fighting for you for your usage so that you use their software and their phone and that means we all get better together yeah absolutely like i've always been a fan of competition like this is how it's it's actually really sad to be building something alone because you don't get to bounce off and see ideas that other people form and adopt and things move much much faster when you have competitors

so i'm curious uh how much did this all cost and how was that paid for um i don't know if we can like talk about numbers but um this wasn't like a huge financial risk in terms of like solana it's five engineers uh we have a partnership and some financial terms with awesome but nothing that's like like the cost of launching a phone today is much much lower than five years ago because you are sitting on a ridiculously like optimized supply chain for building these devices for a dozen different companies and using android which is a very mature os very mature ux

and that's that's like the huge difference these days when when like facebook tried to build their phone they wanted to build everything from scratch their own os from the ground up their own application source similar with windows and that like that's a 300 engineer kind of thing that that's uh there's no way we could have pulled that off jason also has um a ton of you know pretty long-standing supplier relationships um that you know he's been able to pull strings for and that's why the phone has the latest qualcomm chip it may be maybe the first uh phone that hits the market with the latest qualcomm chip so um you know jason's really uh uh super efficient he's got he's got great relationships to leverage and i think the suppliers also kind of see see the

path here i mean there hasn't been a more credible force in tech to launch a new mobile platform and suite of hardware products than crypto and web3 and and they know that so i think everyone's watching if this is successful they're prepared to you know to back more uh products lower end products more hardware peripherals um you know whatever the market will support okay so i uh this this is all great guys and thank you for walking us through this i think uh hopefully bankless listeners learned a lot certainly we did as well um i probably have one last question or like critique i told you the second half was going to get a bit more tough here but like okay so here's here's i think what you've

clarified for me is solana's not trying to get in the hardware game totally get it uh that makes a lot more sense to me the value proposition here is uh the sms product itself i was always bullish on the idea of a web 3 software product for mobile because again you can't go bankless unless you have a desktop machine and that is clearly not the future all right so all of that is is making sense with what you guys are doing this strategy what my question is and this is still a clarification point to you that i'm learning a bit more about the solana ecosystem is the ethereum foundations uh their approach to this in the spirit of

decentralization is addition through subtraction right so their idea the ethereum foundation is that they slowly want to ossify the protocol and then go away all right i think i was initially under the impression that the salonophone was like being developed and funded by the solana foundation okay i learned that is not the case there is this entity called solana labs which is kind of a commercial entity building commercial products for the solana ecosystem and that helps that is that is interesting to me so if you put your ethereum hat on right you'd say like almost solana labs is kind of a little bit like consensus which they

built in fiora they built metamask they built all of these products to support the ethereum probably try the phone at some point in time they probably have 20 times smaller though okay and if ruben's listening he's probably oh phone good idea i'm on that i'm i'm working on that okay so i get that difference now one of my hang-ups is right like we are looking for a more decentralized future here which means ultimately we don't want any centralized development team to control the fate of a blockchain or the ecosystem or to have undo um undue presence right and so you have the solana foundation which is separate you have solana labs which is the commercial entity

but there seems to be like i don't i don't know how the funding works maybe you could clarify that if solana labs is funded by soul tokens but you guys are involved in both solana labs and the solana foundation and the solana protocol itself it just seems to be there's kind of a centralization aspect that's a that's different than the ethereum ecosystem so help me understand this element of it and do you actually think that this is a concern or am i kind of overplaying am i like oh well it looks like this in ethereum and why isn't it exactly like that in solana and you know maybe there's a case of that too help me understand it's like uh i would say you're

i think it's good to be concerned about it because i think ultimately i don't want centralization and the foundation has a totally different goal different board different people on it and they're driving towards decentralization and like billion users without custody that's kind of their their shtick and anatoly is not even involved with the foundation anymore so he doesn't know i got to step i got to like step down from it because like leo from certis is an amazing engineer that's able to take my role as like the person that knows the network inside out at the foundation and i can hand it off to like an amazing community member i don't know if you guys know certain swan or leo at all but

an awesome person so like labs is able to build products and like labs has a bunch of money to do that and like a bunch of engineers to do that and it tries to build products that generally like are not competing with ecosystem projects so we don't want to build uh like a magic eden or a phantom because we see that there's amazing really rock star teams that are have funding and are executing with a vision and just kicking ass but stuff like the phone there's no team in the ecosystem that's like able to do it and this is where we see like an opportunity to like okay maybe we do something here and it pushes the domino

in the ecosystem and unlocks it and meta metaplex the the thing to that started like the nft craze on solana that was incubated by you know a couple engineers at a solana and a product manager and that got spun out as a separate separate thing like that's been kind of how labs operates um in terms of like it's it's worth mentioning by the way you know you mentioned consensus and they built in fiora they built metamask they built truffle and you know on solana we have quick node and genesis go and all these rpc node providers we have phantom you know anatoly mentioned magic eden um there's anchor all these already got built independently by ecosystem

projects that you know often if uh if if we tried to even invest in them there wasn't room um by the time they they got off the ground there they got product market fit really really quickly so um a lot of that you know based stuff you could argue happened in a much more decentralized way it didn't happen from a founder or an organization related to you know the the creation of salon of the network i think there's a difference here though with like ethereum where i don't know if solana will ossify i think it'll become more like linux where there is there is a wider group of adult like people that are developing the protocol at different companies that are contributing to it and

the features track the demands that people have on the hardware as the hardware changes because the way that solana works is so tied to how hardware develops like network cards and cpus and like all the stuff that we optimize for to take advantage of that that changes every two years right that slightly changes and the protocol has to like the runtime has to change the implementations have to change they do so in a way that doesn't break applications but that means that the code has to be updated and people have to do that and as the network has matured we now have like gita which is building meth clients they're contributing to the core code because they have a dependency on the

core code to do a certain thing like mango guys started contributing to the core code because they were seeing performance bottlenecks in their application that they were able to fix and this is more like linux where you know intel red hat all sorts of different companies you can say that like red hat was like labs right they had the most developers at one point working on linux you know the the most core devs but at some point it really became a really really small part of linux as a as a whole like i'd say at this point probably google android guys contribute more lines of code to linux than anyone else thank you guys that's uh that's helpful um i guess last question for you not not

on the phone topic but just since we're on the topic of differences between kind of the the ethereum ecosystem and solana is uh can you guys just provide an update on like scaling and kind of uptime and what the plan is there because i feel like um david and myself and backless listeners have our heads wrapped around the modular blockchain scalability approach and l2s and high settlement assurances and ideally like maximum decentralization but solana i think has historically taken a different approach i want to hear what the approach uh to solana scaling is right now how you guys are thinking about this sure so

this goes back to the heart of i think the what decentralization means to us right like to the solana community how we define it and this comes down to like what are these networks supposed to provide right and their from my understanding is that data availability and the an extreme security of that data is what these networks are supposed to provide and like yellowstone blows up the network is supposed to maintain that state in a provable way and that doesn't actually mean up time you need at least one copy of the state to survive so you can say like hey look i got the copy of the ledger yellowstone blew up russia launched nukes but i still got my one copy in like an island somewhere and

i can prove it to you because i have all the cryptographic signatures from all the validators this is the copy and it repopulates the network and that obviously means in that scenario uptime is down and you're running you're somehow getting all the validators together and rehypothecating the network and rebooting it but that process right like is part of running these systems because you're depending on somebody somewhere keep the copy of the state and being able to recover it no matter what now what that means is that we need to maximize the number of independent truly independent like people that run these nodes for some reason and maintain those in a secure

environment and that includes people that run validators because they want tokens uh it includes circle finance tether with all the exchanges also like dow communities because they want to run a node for for the for fun right but also apps with rpcs like half of the full nodes on the network right now are because there's so much demand for rpc providers because they're serving users for like all the apps that are on solana and all those copies of the state are valid copies of the state any one of those can can recover so like so scalability ties into this because we can't have a network that limits the

number of full nodes right we have to design it in such a way that maximizes the number of people that can join the network that can connect to it and therefore maintain that copy in a real-time secure way like when the block is finalized it's finalized everywhere globally in the entire world so that means it's got to process a ton of signatures per second because every vote from a validator is a signature it's got to handle a lot of network bandwidth because every vote takes network bandwidth and this is kind of how we're thinking about it like we need to optimize it and allow validators to deploy hardware that allows them to scale it in an unbounded way so

scalability to us means that if there's a bottleneck validators can just add cores and that bottleneck goes away it doesn't require us to make protocol changes or launch l2s or anything like that not that that's a that's a different solution different approach right like not not knocking it in any way but having the power of scalability given to the validators and the only thing that they need to do is you know go order some on amazon and deploy better hardware means that we're kind of done right like the network is scalable to whatever limits uh you know organized sand allows david i think i did the thing again

where i just opened up the door to an entirely new different podcast wrapping my head around yeah i know because i do i continue david's gearing up to ask some more questions you know what i think we should do yeah the rub here is that like the cost of the hardware seems to be an a violation of an ethereum ethos which is right there's like we said similar words that we say in the ethereum camp we're like yeah we want everyone to participate in network validation like everyone should like permissionlessly join the network as they so choose but like we're both using these things but there's still like a difference in like what those things actually translates into

one is like in the ethereum camp like a 500 a 750 laptop and in solana in solana world it's like well do you have the means and are you connected to amazon prime and are you willing to spend an extra like two to shout out i don't know what to do and i think anatoly would probably say that doesn't even matter that's an inconsequential cost in the scheme of when you're talking about 32 eth and we go on we'd have so i feel like we've just opened the door to a to be all love each continued at the end of the day we want to bring you guys back and talk about that um probably i think there are some crypto crypto developers out there some ethereum researchers who would like see the okay somebody's got to save the state and if somebody has

one safe state then we're good to go i think i'm not smart enough to like make the argument myself but i think that would offend a lot of it like a core theorem developers yeah we should have you guys back and have i we shouldn't do this now david we should have these guys back and have that conversation maybe in debate and type in on here i love him that's awesome all right this is uh invitation for a future but to be great we've covered called out the web3 mobile phone that has been the scope of today's conversation anatoly raj thank you so much for coming to bankless and telling us more about that we uh we appreciate it keep building during the build market that's what we're here to do thank you thanks guys thank you guys take care and disclaimers of course all of crypto is risky you

could definitely lose what you put in but we are headed west this is the frontier